The thriller writer Robert Ludlum, who died on March 12th aged 73, was one of a handful of authors who invented and came to define airport fiction. He enjoyed a 30-year writing career in which he sold more than 210 million copies of his 21 novels.
Put crudely, he was the fictional arm of the globalisation of American culture. Before him, its popular fiction had been rooted in established genres - westerns, crime fiction, historical romance, sub-James Bond spy thrillers. Like Arthur Hailey and Tom Clancy, Robert Ludlum blasted aside such boundaries, mirroring, as he did so, the rise of the modern Hollywood blockbuster. And yet he did not write his first novel, The Scarlatti Inheritance (1971), until he was in his 40s.
He was born in New York and grew up in Short Hills, New Jersey. He left home as a teenager in 1941 and, getting a part in a touring play, tried to make it as an actor. His parents soon rescued him from Broadway, after which he spent two years with the US Marine Corps in the Pacific in the aftermath of the second World War. He then attended Wesleyan University, in Connecticut, where he met his actress wife, Mary Ryducha.
Together they went into the theatre, where Robert Ludlum spent the next two decades working as an actor, with minor roles on television and on Broadway, and then as a producer, running what was allegedly America's first shopping mall theatre, the Playhouse, in Paramus, New Jersey.
Having a famously deep voice, Robert Ludlum also made some money doing voiceovers on the side; he once claimed that uttering the words "Plunge works fast", in a toilet cleaner commercial, put one of his sons through college. When the theatre business began to pall, he quit to write.
The key ingredients were there from the start - a grand conspiracy, and forces of unimaginable evil that only one individual could thwart. The Scarlatti Inheritance was a preposterous, yet compelling, yarn revolving around the notion that, back in the 1920s, a worldwide cabal of high-ranking Nazi sympathisers made a plan to ensure world domination.
The book was an immediate success, and he followed it up with a book a year through the 1970s, each one with the same signature-title construction, The Bourne Identity (1980), which has just been filmed, perhaps the pick of the bunch. One after another, the titles continued to sell in their millions.
Today, it has become the critical norm to rubbish Robert Ludlum and his ilk as purveyors of semi-literate, right-wing tosh. This is unfair on several counts. For a start, no one survives long in popular fiction without having the ability to keep the pages turning. Secondly, Robert Ludlum was not a right-winger.
Not that his books should be read as serious political commentary. He would probably have disparaged any such claims, being much given to remarks like: "I don't believe that my first name is Leo, or that my last name is Tolstoy. I'm a storyteller."
Which is correct. His great talent was as a storyteller. Arguably, the key to Robert Ludlum's success was precisely the fact that he took a historically political genre, the spy thriller, and turned it into pure escapism by making everything larger than life.
The other keystone of his popularity was painstaking research. Thanks to that, his thrillers always had the air of being written by a man in the know, an important quality in popular fiction.
As Robert Ludlum's prodigious pace slowed a little, following a triple bypass in the mid-1990s, he launched a series, Robert Ludlum's Covert-One, in which his fictional ideas were fleshed out with the help of a co-writer, Gayle Lynds. However, hardcore fans were relieved to see him go solo again with his latest book, The Prometheus Deception (2000).
Robert Ludlum: born 1927; died, March 2001